


Christmas in Market Deeping

by fredbassett



Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 22:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredbassett/pseuds/fredbassett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lynne Talbot had only gone out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas in Market Deeping

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tli for the primeval_denial Secret Santa. The prompts I used were i) anything set post-convergence ii) outsider pov of an anomaly alert and iii) Grown Up Christmas List sung by Michael Buble 2)

By the time Lynne Talbot managed to find somewhere to park her car, any Christmas spirit she might have started out with had long since been left by the wayside.

The town was jam-packed, and a bloody great big outdoor skating rink taking up almost the whole of one car park wasn’t helping matters. The kids loved it, but the adults huddled around the edges looked frozen. Hands were thrust into pockets and scarves pulled up around necks and for anyone without a hat, life looked like it was about to take a turn for the worse as a few flakes of snow started to dance in the air, whipped around by an icy wind that felt like it was blowing straight in from Siberia.

She was very definitely cursing her decision to do some last-minute shopping, and by the look of it, she wasn’t the only one feeling like that.

On the plus side, the weekly German market was doing a roaring trade in roasted chestnuts, baked apples and glühwein, and once she started looking at the stalls, Lynne felt her irritation start to subside. A large chunk of stollen found its way into her shopping basket, as did a bag of Nürnberger Rostbratwürste, small smoked sausages that made a nice snack before dinner. By the time she’d reached the end of the main street, her basket was full and she was in desperate need of a cup of tea and somewhere to sit down.

Her favourite café was heaving but as she walked in a table came free just inside the door. She set her bags down on a chair and made herself comfortable. A tempting array of pastries did their best to make eye-contact and she did her best to avoid their siren-call.

“Orange and cinnamon rooibos tea, please,” she said to the girl who came to take her order.

“Would you like anything else?”

The cakes redoubled their attention-seeking efforts and she succumbed to the lure of a pain au chocolat. Just as her order arrived, an elderly woman with a young boy in tow struggled in through the door and stared vainly around for a table. She looked as in need of a drink as Lynne had done, so she took pity on her and moved her bags onto the low window sill and gestured to the spare chairs.

The woman subsided into one with a grateful sigh. “You’re an angel,” she said cheerfully. “Jason, say thank you to the nice lady.”

“Thank you,” Jason said obediently, plonking himself down in the chair and staring out of the window. “It was him, Nana, I’m sure it was!”

“He thinks he’s just seen someone off the telly,” the woman confided.

“Who’s that?” Lynne asked. Market Deepdale wasn’t exactly known for being a haunt of celebrities.

“Becker!”

The name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “X Factor?” she hazarded.

The boy looked at her scornfully. “Captain Becker! He hunts dinosaurs!”

“He’s mad about dinosaurs,” his grandmother added. “His bedroom’s full of them. Jason’s, I mean, not Captain Becker’s.”

The mention of dinosaurs was enough to shake the memory loose. They’d been in the news for most of the past year and you would probably have had to have been marooned on a desert island not to have heard about the Anomaly Research Centre, but dinosaurs weren’t exactly something she’d ever associated with rural Berkshire, so she hadn’t immediately made the connection. But Captain Becker wasn’t just someone off the telly, he was someone who really did chase after dinosaurs for a living, and if he was in their town, then there was a very good chance that something else was as well.

An uncomfortable feeling of unease settled on Lynne’s stomach as she remembered the news footage from what the press had referred to as Convergence. She didn’t think she’d ever forget the news footage of something huge and horrible stalking through the streets of London, leaving broken, bloodied bodies behind in its wake. Things like that weren’t meant to exist outside the pages of children’s books and encyclopaedias, but apparently now they did, and there were people whose job it was to stop that sort of thing happening.

“Are you sure about that, Jason?” Lynne asked.

“He had a shotgun, of course it was Captain Becker!” Jason replied, leaving Lynne wondering when small boys finally stopped talking at the tops of their voices and over-using exclamation marks. “Can I ask him for his autograph, Nana?”

Jason’s grandmother looked faintly bemused. “I’m sure he’s very busy, dear. Do you want a hot chocolate and some cake?”

* * * * *

Ten years working as a nurse in an Accident and Emergency Unit had left Lynne reasonably unshockable, or so she liked to think, but even so, nothing could have quite prepared her for the sight of something that looked like a reject from the casting line-up for Godzilla looking at her through the window of the café. One minute everything was normal, with shoppers going about the ordinary business of getting ready for another Christmas too full of consumer goods and mince pies, and the next minute nothing would ever be quite normal again. Or at least not for the poor buggers that had just got in its way.

Some people did the sensible thing and ran away. Other stood and stared, and even more started taking pictures or shooting videos on their mobile phones.

Lynne fell into the second category, sitting in the window and staring, aware of the fact that she’d slipped into the role of frightened onlooker, albeit one whose phone was still in her handbag. She had no idea how to break out of the stifling paralysis that settled on her like a heavy and rather stifling blanket. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Jason squealed in excitement and started pointing at the creature, yelling, “Look, Nana, look, it’s an allosaurus!”

Trust a kid to know what the hell it was, Lynne thought, but she didn’t need Jason’s dinosaur mania to tell her that the thing was dangerous. The blood smeared around jaws that would have put a hippopotamus to shame was a bit of a giveaway.

Jason’s grandmother let out a startled shriek, but then did the most sensible thing possible and pulled the boy away from the window, sending cakes and crockery flying everywhere. Screams started up behind them as well and, to Lynne’s horror, the dinosaur’s huge head swivelled in their direction, its small eyes staring straight at her.

Lynne had a sudden horrible feeling that she was about to lose control of her bladder. She dragged in a deep breath and tried not to move. She had absolutely no idea if staying still was the best thing to do or not, but years of watching wildlife documentaries surfaced in her mind and she remembered that most predators seemed to work on the basis that anything edible would promptly leg it, so she stayed exactly where she was.

Unfortunately, it looked like nobody else in the café shared her taste in television programmes.

People jumped away from the window, knocking over tables and chairs, smashing mugs and plates in their mad scramble to get away from the door. The sound of screaming overwhelmed the strains of Christmas music being played in the café and from somewhere outside, Lynne heard a loud bang that sounded like a car backfiring.

“I bet that’s Captain Becker, I told you he’s got a shotgun!” Jason announced excitedly, struggling against his grandmother’s attempts to keep his head below the level of the low window ledge.

“Jason, hush!” Lynne told him. “We don’t want to attract its attention.” She grabbed the arm of a waitress, who was standing behind them, her face slack with fear. “Is there a back way out of here?”

The girl nodded. “Thr… through the kitchen.”

Before Lynne had time to move, the creature head-butted the window, sending a shower of glass everywhere. More screaming followed, and she could see bright red blood dripping from a gash on Jason’s grandmother’s cheek.

There wasn’t time to think, or even worry about the state of her bladder. She rolled away from the window, feeling glass crunch underneath her. The dinosaur stuck its head through the broken window, doing a good impression of every movie stereotype Lynne had ever seen as it roared loudly.

Behind her, a man picked up a chair and swung it straight at the creature’s head. It shattered on the blood-strained jaw, leaving him with just the back gripped in white-knuckled hands.

“Everyone out of here!” he yelled. “The lady says there’s an exit at the back.” He shoved the remains of the chair into the dinosaur’s mouth, grabbed Jason’s grandmother and hauled her bodily away from the window, pushing her towards the back of the shop where customers were already scrambling to find a way out.

The young waitress snapped out of her shock and got hold of Jason’s hand, towing him away from the snapping jaws.

Lynne took refuge behind one of the upturned tables. A moment later, the giant head withdrew and she could hear the heavy thump thump of its feet hitting the pavement as it moved off down the street.

The man who’d hit the creature with a chair stared at her in amazement, as though he could barely come to grips with the fact that he was still alive. Lynne stared back at him, feeling as shocked as he looked, while around them, the café started to empty. The man was in his early 30s, wearing a scruffy black jacket, a pair of faded jeans and workman’s boots.

“You go, I’ll cover you,” he told her, picking up another chair.

She shook her head. “I’m a nurse. There might be someone out there who needs help.”

Before he had chance to argue, the sound of gunfire told her that the creature – the allosaurus, according to Jason – wasn’t having things all its own way out there. She could hear voices yelling at people to get off the streets and a few bystanders did as they were told and crowded in through the café doorway. The man with the chair in his hand promptly started ushering them through to the back and out into the kitchen.

“My name’s Greg,” he told her when it was down to the two of them again. He offered his hand to her and she shook it.

“Lynne,” she said. “I work at the hospital.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather…?” He jerked his thumb towards the back of the café.

She shook her head. “No. There’s probably not much I can do but…” She stopped abruptly as a body came flying through the air to crumple against the wall outside.

“Jesus Christ,” Greg breathed.

He darted outside and Lynne followed him in time to see the allosaurus lumbering towards the ice rink. Market stalls had been smashed into matchwood and a car that had got in the way of the rampaging dinosaur had a very crumpled bonnet. Instead of standing around and taking photographs, people had now done the sensible thing and scattered.

Lynne could see a slender blonde woman shouting orders to what looked like a security team, who were all dressed in black and armed with a variety of weapons. She realised with a shock that the creature that had shoved its head through the window of the café wasn’t the only one. She could see a second one approaching them down the High Street, hard on the heels of the first.

A tall man, also dressed in black, dropped to one knee in the middle of the road and swung a strange-looking weapon up to his shoulder. His immaculate dark hair made him look like he’d stepped straight out of the pages of a fashion magazine. Lynne recognised him from newspaper reports and realised that she was watching Jason’s hero, Captain Becker, at work.

As the second allosaurus charged down the road, the man took aim and fired. The creature came to a shuddering halt, its forelimbs shaking.

“Bloody great big Taser,” Greg said admiringly as the dinosaur crumpled to the ground, smashing a stall full of particularly tacky Christmas decorations. He looked at the man who’d been knocked into the wall. “Should we move him?”

She went to her knees next to the man and tried to assess how badly injured he was. His face was ashen pale and she couldn’t immediately find a pulse. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

The man was wearing the black uniform of the security team and from the bulk around his chest he appeared to be wearing some sort of Kevlar vest. If he was lucky, that might have given him some protection from the impact. His head lolled forward onto his chest and there was blood in his hair. Lynne carefully felt around the back of his head, trying to ignore the screams and gunfire still erupting all around her and concentrate on the injured man. His skull felt intact, which was a distinct bonus.

In the midst of a chaotic situation, there was no guarantee that any casualties would be evacuated quickly. The police would often quite properly refuse to allow paramedic crews into a crisis situation until it had been contained and she had no idea what sort of protocols applied to anything involving dinosaurs.

“Get him off the street!” Becker’s Home Counties accent screamed expensive education and held an unmistakeable tone of command.

“I don’t know the extent of his injuries,” Lynne protested. “It could make things worse.”

The young officer gave her an appraising glance. “You’re a medic?”

“I’m a nurse, not a paramedic.”

“Get him off the street,” he repeated. “I’ll take full responsibility. There’s at least one more of those things around and it might arrive any minute. We can’t deal with casualties in the middle of the road and if he stays here he’s a sitting duck.”

Next to them, the allosaurus’s tail smacked hard onto the tarmac as the dinosaur looked like it was starting to wake up. Becker cursed under his breath and promptly shot it again with his Taser rifle.

From what Lynne could see, the soldiers were using non-lethal force against the creatures, even though they all seemed to be carrying conventional weapons as well. But they seemed to be confining their use of those to firing into the air in an attempt to stop the dinosaurs in their tracks, confusing them with the noise.

The small blonde woman who Lynne had seen giving orders to the men ran up to the fallen creature and shot the contents of a very large syringe into one forelimb. “That’ll keep him out for the count. Connor’s found the anomaly, Becker. He’s locking it down now. It’s in the middle of a warehouse.”

“Shame it didn’t have better doors,” Becker said.

“Connor said they punched a hole in the wall and left that way.”

That made Becker’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. He was a good-looking bloke and Lynne found herself wondering how he’d got the scar that cut across one dark brow.

He tilted his head to one side, listening to the radio feed in his ear. “Jess, I need paramedics here as fast as you can get them in,” he said in response. “Harris is down and we’ve got civilian casualties. I need a fire crew as well. One of the buggers has squashed a car and there’s someone trapped inside. We need cutting equipment.” He turned his attention back to Lynne for a moment. “Can you take a look at the people in the car when you’ve got Harris inside?”

Lynne felt like she was being dragged along by events wholly outside her control. She had no medical supplies and could do little more than provide a reassuring voice, but this man clearly wasn’t used to taking no for an answer. Despite the fact that her hands were shaking and she desperately needed the loo, she found herself nodding.

While Becker and the woman set off in pursuit of the other creature, Lynne and Greg did their best to move the unconscious soldier as gently as possible. Greg swept away as much broken glass and crockery with his feet as he could, and then they upturned one of the café tables and used it as a makeshift stretcher. The soldier – Harris – groaned as they manoeuvred him in through the door, which Lynne took to be a good sign. They cleared a corner at the back of the café and did their best to make him comfortable.

“Excuse me,” Lynne said, squirming with embarrassment and the discomfort of a full bladder. Leaving Greg to keep an eye on the injured man, she made a dash for the ladies.

As she washed her hands afterwards, Lynne was surprised to see a trickle of blood running down her cheek from a cut on her temple. She hadn’t felt anything hit her, but it looked like Jason’s nan hadn’t been the only one to have been caught by flying glass. She quickly dabbed at the cut with a paper towel.

“You’re staying exactly where you are, mate,” she heard Greg telling Harris as she went back into the wrecked interior of the café. “Your boss looks like the sort of bloke I don’t want to get into an argument with and he’ll have our guts if we let you go back out there after taking a whack like that.”

“Too bloody right,” Lynne said. “You’re not going to have escaped a bang like that without concussion and probably some cracked ribs. But if your radio’s working, have a word with your control and tell them you’re awake. Greg, I need to take a look at the occupants of that car. Can you keep an eye out for me?”

If truth be told, she was terrified of going back out onto the street but she’d made the decision to remain behind and was too stubborn to back down now.

Greg nodded and together they made their way back outside, while behind them, Harris was doing his best to reassure someone called Jess that he was still alive. Lynne could still hear the sound of screams and splintering wood, as well as Captain Becker’s clear parade ground voice ordering people to get off the streets.

“Jesus, what does it take for some people to get the bloody hint?” Greg muttered incredulously, as they ran up to a car in the middle of the road, its front crushed by the enormous dinosaur as it had rampaged down the road.

A woman in her 50s was trapped in her seat by the steering column pressing against her chest. Her breathing was laboured and she was bleeding from numerous cuts to her face and hands.

“Help me, please help me!” Her voice was weak and her breathing was laboured, but that could easily have been as a result of shock.

“Hello, what’s your name?” Lynne asked, leaning in through the broken windscreen.

“Anna,” the woman said, her frightened eyes locking onto Lynne’s. “Can you help me?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Lynne said. “My name’s Lynne. I’m a nurse. There’ll be an ambulance on its way very soon,” she said, hoping she wasn’t telling the woman a lie. The fire brigade will be coming too. They’ll soon have you out of there.”

Lynne was glad of Greg’s presence next to here as she kept talking to the frightened woman, while ahead of them, the team of soldiers and the blonde-haired girl did their best to get close enough to the huge creature to use their Taser weapons. From what Lyne could see, they were doing their best to keep it moving in the direction of the now-deserted ice rink.

A sudden roar from behind them brought the unwelcome realisation that a third one was on its way to join the party. Lynne crouched down beside the car as Anna wailed in terror, “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me!”

“Not going to leave you, Anna,” Greg said quickly. He put his arm around Lynne’s shoulders and whispered in her ear, “Get back inside the café, I’ll stay here.”

Lynne shook here head. The huge creature was powering towards them down the main street. She knew that if she ran now, the chances were that it would be like a mouse trying to out-run a very big, very powerful cat. A yell from Captain Becker told her that he was alert to the approaching danger, but he had his hands full with the other creature.

The sudden sound of a car engine accelerating made Lynne look behind her. A small red car was approaching at speed, swerving around debris, clearly intent on overtaking the running dinosaur. The sound of a horn blaring loudly caused the creature to slow down and look around. Its tail swept the canvas top off one of the few stalls left standing and sent some shattered wood raining down on the top of Anna’s car. She screamed loudly, turning the dinosaur’s attention away from the car and onto them.

Greg’s arm tightened around Lynne’s shoulders and with his other hand he grabbed a long piece of wood that had come to rest close to him. It would be a bit like trying to fend a lion off with a matchstick, but she’d just have to hope that – like the chair – it might do some good.

“Stay quiet, Anna, please!” Lynne urged.

The driver of the car hammered his fist on the horn again and again, drowning out Anna’s screams. Lynne could see him fighting for control of the vehicle as it mounted the pavement, narrowly avoiding a lamppost but scattering the table and chairs that still remained standing outside the café. The driver looked surprisingly impassive as he hauled hard on the wheel, skidding to a halt immediately in front of the allosaurus.

The car door opened and the man yelled, “Oi, ugly!” He waved his arms about to attract its attention then pulled one of the Taser rifles out of the car and took aim. The creature shied away and it looked like the shot had missed. It struck at him with its enormous head, jaws open, displaying large, yellow teeth.

Anna screamed again and Lynne didn’t blame her.

The man held his ground and fired again, straight into the dinosaur’s open mouth. It jerked backwards, shaking its head from side to side, then struck again. This time the man jumped out of the way and shot it again a second time, aiming for its chest.

The roar that followed made Lynne very glad she’d taken the chance to go to the loo while she had a chance. She wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t. Watching the scene unfold was bad enough, but not watching would be even worse.

A third shot from the rifle followed in quick succession, but must have been enough to empty its battery. The man dropped it on the floor and pulled a gun from the back of his jeans, steadying himself into the two-handed shooting stance familiar from the endless diet of American cop shows one of her colleagues liked watching in the break room at work.

The dinosaur took a step sideways and started to sway.

“Don’t shoot, Matt, it’s going down!” The blonde woman ordered, appearing from amidst the wreckage of the German market.

“My EMD’s out of charge,” he told her. “Give it another shot, Abby. This one’s got a central nervous system made of stainless steel, by the look of it.” His accent was Northern Irish, and Lynne vaguely remembered hearing him interviewed on the radio when the country had descended into dinosaur-mania.

Abby promptly obliged and at the fourth hit the dinosaur finally did the decent thing and toppled sideways into the front of a butcher’s shop. “Two down, one to go,” she said, with a gamine grin. “What’s Becker playing at with the last one?”

“I think he wants to keep it as a pet,” the man said. A moment later he demanded into his radio microphone, “Oi, soldier boy, Abby wants to know what you’re playing at…”

From the grin on the man’s face, Lynne presumed that he’d just been on the receiving end of a rude reply.

The blast of a shotgun drew a frown from Abby, but from what Lynne could see, the soldiers were still firing into the air doing their best to check the headlong dash from the remaining dinosaur. The creature swerved to its right, breaking through the barrier around the ice rink. It took three long strides onto the ice before it started to slide. Even with its long tail extended for balance, the dinosaur was clearly fighting a losing battle with gravity. It lurched one way and then the other before crashing down with a very heavy thump. The small forelimbs wouldn’t be any use at levering it upright. It was down, and it was going to stay down. Becker and several other soldiers promptly closed in on it, firing their Taser weapons from the hip.

“Jess, the third allosaurus is down, I repeat, it’s down,” the Irishman said calmly, sounding like he was reading the weather report, not delivering the news that three rampaging dinosaurs had finally been stopped. “Get the paramedics and the fire crews in as fast as you can, please.”

Hearing those words, Lynne promptly turned to Greg and hugged him hard. He returned her embrace, holding her tightly as she started to shake with reaction.

Sod British stiff upper lips.

* * * * *

“The paramedics say the woman in the car will be fine,” Greg said, handing Lynne a polystyrene cup full of steaming glühwein. Miraculously, the stall selling the hot mulled wine had escaped unscathed, and the market trader was now distributing it to the rescue teams and anyone who had stayed behind to help.

Lynne and Greg were huddled together outside the café, watching as the unconscious body of the last huge allosaurus was winched up onto the back of a flat-bed lorry for transport back to the warehouse. According to one of the response team, a softly-spoken woman called Emily, they would be released back into their own time.

Camera crews had now descended on Market Deepdale in force and were filming the wreckage and doing their best to get interviews with anyone who would talk to them. Lynne and Greg had spoken briefly to Captain Becker, who’d thanked them for what they’d done for his injured team member and the woman in the car, but they’d done their best to avoid the media, pleading – untruthfully – that they were too shocked to give any interviews at the moment. All they really wanted to do was sit there and come to terms with the fact that they were still alive.

Behind them in the café, the music system was still playing Christmas songs. Lynne heard the words, _So here's my lifelong wish, my grown-up Christmas list, not for myself, but for a world in need, no more lives torn apart and hoped that it might, just for once, be true._

“How the bloody hell do they cope with that sort of thing day in, day out?” Greg asked. “They all look so bloody ordinary. Just like you and me, really.”

Lynne reached out and squeezed his hand. “There was nothing ordinary about smashing a chair on that thing’s nose,” she said. “You could sell your story, you know. Hero takes on dinosaur armed with nothing more than a chair. You know the kind of thing.”

She saw a tinge of red on his cheeks. “You were the brave one, agreeing to help Anna. I just reacted without thinking.”

“I was bloody terrified,” she said.

“My gran used to say that’s what being brave is, doing things in spite of being scared of them.”

The mention of Greg’s grandmother sparked off a thought in Lynne’s mind. She gulped her wine down and said, “Come with me, Greg, I need some moral support for this.” And before he had time to ask what she meant, she made a beeline for where Captain Becker watching as the allosaurus was driven away.

He smiled at her and raised his scarred eyebrow enquiringly.

“Would you mind giving me your autograph?” she asked, thrusting a notebook and a pen at him.

The Irishman who she’d heard the others calling Matt gave a surprised bark of laughter. “Your fan club’s growing, mate.”

“It’s not for me,” Lynne said quickly.

That provoked even more laughter. “Don’t hurt soldier boy’s feelings,” Matt said. “It’s not every day he gets asked for his autograph, you know.”

“Actually, it is,” Becker said, punching Matt on the arm. “You’re just jealous.”

“It’s for a little boy called Jason,” Lynne said. “He was in the café with me.”

Becker took the notebook from her and wrote the words: ‘For Jason, from Captain Becker’, signing his name legibly but with a distinct flourish. It looked like he’d had a lot of practise at signing autographs.

“You really ought to let Connor set up that Twitter account for you,” Abby said.

Becker gave her a distinctly withering glance.

“He loves it really,” Abby said, confidingly.

“You look like you all do, actually,” Lynne said, smiling at her. “You didn’t want those creatures to be killed, did you? Despite what they were doing.”

“They’re wild animals,” Abby said. “They don’t do things like this out of badness. They’re out of their own time, probably afraid. It’s up to us to put them back where they belong if we possibly can.” She reached out and touched Lynne on the arm. “Thanks for what you did today. Both of you. And the good news is that we’ve just heard from our field coordinator. No one was killed. There were quite a few injuries, but the hospital thinks everyone will be fine.”

Lynne felt tears prick at her eyes.

_No more lives torn apart._

It looked very much like Christmas wishes did sometimes come true. Now all she needed to do was find Jason and give him Captain Becker’s autograph.


End file.
